Cartoonists Are Much Smarter than Republicans

Okay, I’ll admit the title of this post doesn’t really say anything. My toaster is smarter than most Republicans.

But let’s focus specifically on the budget and tax negotiations. As I explained the other day, we basically have a situation where the President wants to trick GOPers into jumping out of the “fiscal cliff” frying pan and into the Obama class-warfare fire.

The frying pan is not a good option since it means a return of Clinton-era tax rates (but unfortunately not a return to Clinton-era levels of spending and regulation), but at least there would also be “sequestration,” which is budget-wonk term for automatic reductions in the growth of government spending.

Obama’s class-warfare fire, by contrast, is nothing but bad news. The tax increases might not be as large in the short run, but they would be designed to impose maximum damage on the economy. And the sequester would disappear. Indeed, Obama’s actually demanding more Keynesian stimulus!

Gullible Republicans seem to think this is just peachy keen, but here is the work of some cartoonists with a more realistic assessment. We’ll start with my favorite, from Robert Ariail, if for no other reason than it builds upon a cartoon I created for this 2011 post.

Here are two cartoons about that share the same theme, putting Obama in the role of Wimpy from the Popeye series. If that’s not a familiar cultural reference (i.e., if you’re not as old as me), watch this YouTube clip.

Your cartoonists sure have a strong Republican bias, unless they’re Democrats who are trying to express support for Obama tricking the dumb Republicans.

But in fact VP wannabee Paul Ryan said that cutting the military budget isn’t on the table, and that his party won’t accept anything less than a significant increase in military spending even though the Cold War has been over for twenty years and Obama is winding down Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars. So it’s really the Republicans who aren’t serious about spending cuts.

[…] the beginning of the month, I posted a bunch of cartoons that portrayed Obama as being very dogmatic and inflexible in the negotiations, while showing Republicans as being clueless and naive. Well, here’s […]

[…] Greece, the euro, fiscal policy, and the rest of Europe is a classic. The other two I’ve used (here and here) are funny, but not in the same league. But if you need some added humor to compensate, […]